[MD] {MD] Intention changes physical world

[Ham Priday]

Case, and all --


First, a side note to David M. and all "2006 Posters" voters:

Gee, fella's, thanks for including me on your "Appreciated Posters" list!  I
consider it an honor -- even to come in last.  (Since I've seriously
considered
dropping out several times, you realize of course that this token of
appreciation only means I'm stuck in your craw for the indefinite future.)

[Ham]:
> The subjective is AWARENESS of being.
> You can't reduce existence to subjectivity,
> to awareness with no object.  Pure awareness
> is nothingness; awareness always presupposes
> a referent.  We cannot escape the dichotomy.

[Case]:
> I seriously doubt if we are going to get much past this point.
> Aware beings are a subset of beings. Rocks are. But rocks
> are not aware. Awareness does not exist in the absence of
> beingness. I do not see any meaning at all in the term "pure
> awareness". One might say awareness is a property of being
> like solidity.

Once again, I'm in absolute agreement that Awareness does not exist in the
absence of beingness.  It's a mutually exclusive contingency of beingness,
just as Beingness is a mutually exclusive contingency of awareness.
Existence = Being-Aware.  Thus, a rock is nothing if it is not made aware,
and awareness is nothing if it has no object.  One is contingent upon the
other.  That's the dichotomy we can't escape in finitude.

Where we disagree is the proposition that awareness is a "property of
being."  There is no property of subjectivity in a rock, a tree, or a
biological organism.  The fact that you think with your brain and feel with
your sense organs is not what makes you subjectively aware.  Doesn't the
cerebro-nervous system continue to function whether you are conscious or
unconscious?  Yet, you are not aware when you are anesthetized into
unconsciousness.  Why?  Because the "objective content" of your conscious
(subjective) awareness is removed as a result of the anesthesia.  Because,
without an object, awareness is reduced to nothing.  Proprietary awareness
is not a "level", "pattern", or property of beingness.   It is the
contingency
of being-aware.

[Case]:
> Quality to me is the Tao. It is formless and nameless. I
> have a particular relationship to it I suppose but whatever
> subjective value it may have is mine or yours. We can
> construct whatever metaphorical fingers we would like to
> point at it but the best we can hope for in this respect is
> that sometimes it looks like this or that. But I don't really
> puzzle much over its true nature. It is an idea of such
> marvelous ambiguity that it means everything and nothing
> at the same time.

I don't know what your "particular relationship" to Quality is, but I don't
see that it's distinguishable from subjective Value.  Anything subjective is
relative and conditional, hence is existential rather than primary.  Finite
existents like you and I can only hypothesize the primary source.

[Case]:
> If awareness can not exist without being as you seem to
> agree here but something can be but not be aware,
> how do being and awareness constitute a dichotomy?
> Beyond this "SOMist" is one of the labels that has been
> slung at me before and by people who actually think it's
> a bad thing. Pirsig does not get rid of SOM he just gives
> a different way of looking at it. He does not say it is
> naughty, don't use it anymore in fact he uses it himself.

Being and awareness are the actualized contingencies of Essence which is
neither of these.  The dichotomy arises from the negation of nothingness -- 
the antithesis of Essence.  I won't risk giving you another headache by
elaborating on nothingness, except to say that it is the ground of
existential reality.  The entity (identity) that I call Essence is absolute
and whole in its 'is-ness' (i.e., it is free of nothingness).

[Case]:
> You are getting real close to the line with the psychic business.
> There is no awareness without being. My body IS self organizing.
> It does create and recreate itself constantly. In fact to accomplish
> this it borrows a slurp of iced tea here, a gulp of chicken soup
> there, the occasional bag of Doritos and sucks in massive
> quantities of oxygen.  From this process emerges very little
> physical activity but lots of random musings generally manifest
> as hot air.

No disagreement there.  But you're talking about Nature, the biological
process we intellectualize in time and space.

[Case]:
> But the point is that awareness does not exist in the absence
> of matter and it seems to prefer really complex configurations
> of matter to survive. I would like to say it is a state of matter
> but I would be willing to back off a bit and say it is a state of
> complexity.

Well, back off a bit more and look at it this way: It's no more "complex"
than the intellect is capable of constructing.  All knowledge is subjective.
For someone who is incapable of understanding biological processes, it's
much simpler.

[Case]:
> I think the problem with Hegel and Kant and all those dudes
> laboring before the last half of the 20th century is that they just
> did not have access to the information they needed to simplify
> their speculations.

Hegel and Kant weren't scientists.  Their reality paradigm was metaphysical.

[Case]:
> I apologize for being obstinate but I really don't have
> the stomach for Hegel.
> [SNIP]
> Awareness is a property of being. I have no reason
> whatever to think that it exists in a disembodied state.
> Nor do I see the relevance of a primary source but if
> there is one I see no reason why I should be unaware of it.

I know where you're coming from, Case.  I've been there myself.  In my first
five decades on this planet, I successively adopted, then shed, the
doctrines of religion, science, pantheism, mysticism, and existentialism as
an answer to my quest.  It took two more decades to develop my own
philosophy, drawing upon luminaries like Plotinus, Cusa, and Eckhart.  One
thing I learned in the process was not to 'throw the babe out with the
bathwater,' not to reject out of hand the "spiritual" component of existence
simply because it's fashionable or sophisticated in this scientific age to
abjure religion.

An ontogony founded on Essence transcends objectivism in the
cause-and-effect sense, as well as belief in a Supreme Being who rewards and
punishes human beings for their behavior.  I can now understand beauty and
order in the universe as evidence of the spiritual component I was looking
for.  I can sense my connection to Essence in these values, even while
realizing that my "individuality" as a finite creature is conditional and
illusionary.  The Pirsigians think they've achieved higher insight by
imagining (theorizing?) Quality as a pan-esthetic principle.  But it strains
both logic and imagination to posit a heirarchical principle as the source
of  differentiated reality.

[Case]:
> Maybe if you treated all these negations as mathematical,
> some of them could cancel out and you would be able to
> just make straight forward statements about things. I have
> tried to read the paragraph above three or four times and
> it just goes round and round. It is as though you are trying
> to construct a mechanical process out of abstractions.
> This abstraction must do this or negate that...

Yes, that's the problem with trying to articulate metaphyics concepts as if
they were physical.  I've been making an effort to simplify my thesis, but
it's not the whole solution.  If I'd written it as a dumbed-down essay on
Morality or Freedom, it would have been criticized as mere platitudes or
pablum for the masses.  However, I'm still working on it, and such
complaints as yours help me recognize the troublesome areas.

[SNIP]

[Case]:
> I have second, third and fourth thoughts all the time.
> But really our tracks are on like separate continents here.
> I can't imagine what possessed you to think along these
> lines in the first place. It is not so much that you are
> off track or on a different track. It's more like a different
> kind of track made for vehicles with square wheels.

I take your point with no offense.  In fact, you made me laugh.  I must work
on getting that square track built.  It's just that upgrading the
infrastructure is such a burden on taxpayers these days ;-).

Essentially yours,
Ham